More in Football:

I just finished writing the Vols link roundup for today and for some strange reason, I have this intense desire to find a Courtyard Marriott in Orlando and spend a few days at Universal waving magic wands.

I blame Peyton Manning.

Yeah, Tennessee’s favorite son makes everything more appealing. I’m just afraid he’s going to show up in my feed making jokes about kale smoothies and then I’m going to have to try one.

Which makes me wonder.

What are three products that even Peyton Manning couldn’t sell?

Just off the top of my head here:

1. Fish jerky

No. Just, no.

My wife and I went to Hawaii on our honeymoon a long, long time ago. We awoke to the salt in the air, the breeze in our hair, and the sound of the waves crashing on the beach in our ears. We enjoyed a breakfast of pancakes with coconut syrup and fresh-squeezed guava juice that we still talk about nearly 25 years later.

The day went downhill from there. We decided to drive completely around whichever island we were on at the time, and the hairpin-after-hairpin endeavor had me sick as vomit by noon when we finally got to the top and found a little shack that had some food. I basically just got out of the car and tried in vain to make the world stand still while my wife ventured into the rickety old store for something to eat. She came out with some canned guava juice (not the same thing as fresh-squeezed, it turns out) and a package of fish jerky.

When we got back in the car and started back down the mountain, she opened the bag. Suddenly, everything smelled like we’d been marinating in rotted fish guts for a week. She held some chum out to me, and I not-so-politely declined, but she completely ignored the code red coming from her sense of smell and popped a piece into her mouth like it was nothing to fear.

For nearly quarter of a century, this moment has remained the best evidence that I am in fact smarter than she is. Also, that she is destined to die of curiousity long before me.

That fish jerky was not in her mouth for long, and it wasn’t in our car for much longer. If we could have tossed it to the next island, we would have. The smell, though, I am convinced, remains in the rental car to this day. I’m guessing they had to retire that one and write “No fish jerky” into all of their contracts after that.

So, if Peyton Manning showed up at my doorstep trying to sell me fish jerky, I would first say, “Hey, it’s Peyton Manning,” and then I would beat him with an iron pipe.

2. Lasagna

This is just me. It’s a long story, and I wrote about it for a freshman comp class at Belmont many years ago. This story doesn’t begin, “Once upon a time,” but like this:

I never really liked lasagna in the first place. Initially, I thought that someone was conducting an autopsy in the church’s fellowship hall. There were rows and rows of steel pans, each containing steaming layers of thick, wet noodles that reminded me of folded flaps of dead skin. In between each layer were little white specks of cheese being pushed out of their hiding places by bubbling rivers of tomato sauce. The same sauce was splattered all over the top of the evil pie, but the soggy chunks of over-ripe tomatoes were more visible, more repulsive. The lasagna simply did not look good. But I was hungry, and the only chance I had to get control of my current headache was to eat. So I slapped a heaping spoonful of it on my plate, found my seat, and choked down every last bite.

That story doesn’t end well, either, with me puking into a plastic grocery bag in the front seat of some stranger’s new car on the way to the hospital and me subsequently dropping out of school, but I’ll spare you the details.

Suffice it to say that lasagna is from the devil. Even if Peyton Manning is the delivery boy.

3. Is this a joke?

I don’t know if I actually believe that this is actually a real product, but even the mere idea of squeeze bacon is about as wrong as you can get.

Bacon has to win the award for the food product with the highest variance. If it’s crispy, it’s . . . well, I don’t even have words to describe just how perfect a perfectly crispy slice of perfect bacon tastes. You’ve had one. You know.

But contrary to popular opinion, you can actually ruin bacon, and ruined bacon is the worst of the worst. Just about every fast food place gets this wrong by taking a perfectly good piece of bacon and barely warming it in the microwave before slapping it on some breakfast sandwich. It’s limp. Stringy. Practically still oinking.

It’s nasty, is what I’m saying.

The only thing I can think of that would be worse is making it into a puree, which appears to be what the good folks of Vilhelm Lilleflosk’s have done. For this, they deserve enough jail time to fully consider their offense against society. You don’t do that to bacon.

Wow. I’ve never actually met another person who’s been in close proximity to fish jerky and lived to tell about it, so congrats. My wife is permanently damaged, though, so I’m now beginning to wonder about you. Seriously, though, getting sick on your honeymoon has to be the worst. We didn’t actually get sick, but we did make the first of many stupid mistakes by thinking we could walk back to our hotel from the top of Diamond Head. We were both as crispy as a good piece of bacon for most of the rest of the trip. And yeah,… Read more »

My one item would Abita Purple Haze beer. We have a sports bar chain called Taco Mac here that carries over 100 different beers. If you try 75 different types you get a free t-shirt. So here I am up to like 45 on my beer tried list, trying to pick something really different. I saw the ABH and said why not. Normally I can finish anything I order and dont like but this beer was so bad I had to get something else and send a nearly full bottle back. The Purple Haze beer was so awful I probably… Read more »

1. Bible Bars, an item we could special order at the Christian bookstore I worked at in college. Contains all the foods mentioned in a single obscure verse from Deuteronomy (wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, honey)!

2. Robitussin, unless the commercial is just, “Hey, this is going to taste as bad as you feel, and that’s why you have to drink it. Omaha!”

3. Sushi. Unlike other foods you try and don’t enjoy (and don’t want to spit out in pleasant company), sushi takes forever to chew and swallow. There’s far too much time to contemplate your choices.